2014 FAILURE REPORT
MONITORING, EVALUATING,
AND ADAPTING TO FAILURE
FAILURE REPORT
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Introduction
Pay Early Rather Than Later
Dr. Ernesto Sirolli . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 03
Mina Shahid and Mark Brown. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Learning the Hard Way
Leaders Ask for Help
Matthieu Bister. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 05
Isabelle Barbeau. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Wearing Too Many Hats
The Learning Curve
Meaghan Langille. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 06
Souzan Mirza. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Investing in People and Systems
Failure to Let Go
Miriam Hird-Younger. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 07
Quinn Conlon. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Missing the Forest for the Trees
Just Not Good Enough
Faiza Tamaiko and Jon Haley. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 08
Jeeshan Ahmed. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Managing Scale and Growth
“You Never Came to Visit”
Esther Aba Eshun and Gordon Chan. . . . . . 09
Rebecca Kresta. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Failure to Fail, and to Learn
Monitoring, Evaluating, and Adapting
Boris Martin. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
to Failure in a Complex System
WatSan Venture Team . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
2
INTRODUCTION:
FAILURE AS MEDICINE
By Dr. Ernesto Sirolli, Sustainable Development expert,
founder of the Enterprise Facilitation approach
“Every well-meaning project we embarked upon
returned the same result – resounding failure!”
DR. ERNESTO SIROLLI
My life, both personally and professionally, has been shaped
by my experiences as a young man in Africa. I’ve told this
story many times before, notably in my book, Ripples From
the Zambezi, but I tell it here again because I believe it’s
important. For seven years, I worked for an Italian NGO in
Zambia, Kenya, Algerian, Somalia, and the Ivory Coast. My
faith in the change we were driving was gradually eroded
as every well-meaning project we embarked upon returned
the same result – resounding failure!
show up. Rather than question the locals on their lack of
enthusiasm, we simply said, “Thank God we’re here!”
The season progressed, and our crops were growing
beautifully. The valley was fertile and the harvest promised
unprecedented bounty. You can only imagine our shock
and distress when, just before the harvest as the tomatoes
were beginning to ripen, some two hundred hippos came
out of the water during the night, ate every bit of food, and
returned to the Zambezi.
The first project I was a part of, an agricultural initiative in
southern Zambia, was the most critical experience in the
development of my current paradigm. We arrived off the
coast of the Zambezi River with Italian seeds, the very best
of intentions, and a comprehensive plan to feed the poor
Zambian people.
We looked at the Zambians standing by, speechless for a
moment, then finally cried, “My God, the hippos!”
“Yes,” came the reply, “that’s why we have no agriculture here.”
What a failure! We had entered the community so certain of
what the Zambians needed, so blinded by our patronizing
arrogance, that we had neglected even the most superficial
of consultations with the local people.
Our first failure, of many, was ignoring the complete and
total lack of interest the local people had in agriculture. We
had to pay them to come work and, occasionally, they would
3
However, after seeing the work that other NGOs were doing
in the sector I became quite proud of our work in Zambia,
for at the very least we had fed the hippos. Contrary to the
commercials we see on the television, the development
sector is far from perfect. In fact, it can be downright toxic if
benevolent westerners, full of pomp and purpose, are left to
their own meddlesome devices.
This is why I applaud the small-but-mighty Engineers
Without Borders Canada for openly publishing stories of
their failure for the world to see. In his introduction to the
2012 Failure Report, co-founder George Roter stated that
failure makes us stop and reconsider, “forcing [us] to ask
whether we succeeded or not, and to make changes if the
answer is ‘not’.”
The development sector is plagued by NGO’s chronic
unwillingness to own up to their mistakes for the (legitimate)
fear that donors will stop supporting them. As a result, failures
are repeated, poor practices are pervasive and ultimately it
is the local, passionate people on the ground – those with
excellent ideas, who know their community better than any
westerner – that suffer.
This report is certainly not an attempt to sensationalize or
glamourize failure – as in my personal experience, there is
nothing sensational or glamorous about it! Rather, this is a
collection of testimonies by people that are brave enough to
announce to the world that they were going about it wrong.
This is a challenging thing to do, but they do it because
they believe in the power of opening up these difficult
conversations. The stories in this report are about failure. But
they are not about defeat. They are about experiences that
have shaped these individuals and, through extension, the
organization of which they’re a part.
Yes, my first experience in Zambia was a waste of resources.
It was humiliating. Shameful. A very bitter pill for a young,
motivated person to swallow, and naturally I was distraught.
But failure can be the unpleasant medicine necessary to push
us, albeit forcefully and more often than not, uncomfortably,
in the right direction.
By challenging their work, they are challenging chronic
and pervasive problems in the international development
sector. They are making themselves vulnerable because they
recognize that in sharing their experiences they can educate
others about the realities of development on the ground. And
finally, they realize that by admitting their failures – particularly
those of a more personal nature – they are making a sincere
and valiant effort to learn from their own mistakes. They have
the foresight to realize that this failure, painful as it may be, can
be a wonderful gift if they choose to take their hard earned
lesson and act on it in a meaningful way.
My failure illustrated, with the particular clarity that failure
affords, what was wrong with the current approach to
development, and by extension the direction that I should
take and the values that I should adopt.
As a result of my humbling experience, I decided to
flip the development dynamic – rather than applying
my solutions to others’ problems, I became a servant to
the local passion of capable, dedicated entrepreneurs. I
entered into communities with no ideas, no agenda, and
simply connected people to the resources they needed
to realize their entrepreneurial aspirations. However, these
businesses certainly didn’t succeed overnight – a culture of
entrepreneurship cannot exist without allowing, forgiving
and even embracing ‘mistakes’, so failure was an inherent part
of their growth. This new ‘enterprise facilitation’ approach was
wildly effective – it’s currently being practiced in over 300
communities and is responsible for 40,000 businesses worldwide. This radical change in direction that led to so much
good wouldn’t have been possible had I ignored the failure,
and therefore ignored the lesson, from my time in Zambia.
These stories are not the endings. They are starting points;
beginnings of new directions. These authors had the
courage to speak out and admit to others and – perhaps
most importantly – to themselves, that they were wrong.
To those reading, I implore you: don’t restrict your learnings to
this document. Use these stories as a learning tool, certainly,
but also as a spring board. I want you to ask yourself, honestly
and critically, in what ways have you failed? What are those
failures telling you, and what needs to change as a result?
Yes, it is difficult. But, as the stories in this report clearly attest,
it is more than possible.
4
LEARNING THE
HARD WAY
By Matthieu Bister, Pivot Fellowship Co-Lead
The Pivot Fellowship is an eight-month social intrapreneurship
training program designed to support and activate Canadian
professionals to be changemakers in their workplace. The
program welcomes other innovators as well, through some of
its activities. At the time of writing, we have just run our second
Pivot Bootcamp as part of the program pilot, which re-sparked
a passion for corporate social innovation for 15 participants, and
I am proud to call it a success! We achieved and surpassed our
goal for the pilot program. Not only did we learn; I truly believe
that it will carry an impact far beyond the eight months of the
initiative’s first cohort. Our failures are why we had to learn things
the hard way.
After our first challenge, I didn’t deliver on all the activities
we had designed and promised to EWBers out of guilt, and
because I lacked the personal resilience to be a rapidly pivoting
entrepreneur myself. This created a reinforcing loop of guilt and
failures, preventing me from reaching out for help.
It also seemed to me that our oversized ambition was reinforced
organizationally. I thought I was expected to be able to
coordinate and execute on the design, promotion and delivery
of the pilot program by myself. This perception was based on
years of seeing other initiatives’ founders and leaders building
things with their heart and sweat, and it created the pressure that
I should be able to do the same by myself. Again, this prevented
me from fully leveraging the help available around me.
Failures
The first challenge we faced was the number of applications
for the first cohort – it was dramatically lower than what we
expected. Our goal was to have 50 applicants from which
we would select eight to twelve Fellows, 80% of which we
anticipated would be Engineers Without Borders Canada
members (EWBers).
Learning
I adapted my mental model to accept that a social entrepreneur,
as much as a social intrapreneur, is never alone. One should
never start any social innovation thinking one has to shoulder
all the weight and be responsible to coordinate everything. This
recognition is allowing me to let go of most of the accumulated
guilt, and be excited about the coming three years as we extend
our capacity to deliver on our ambitions.
Instead, we started off with only three people who had almost
never been involved with EWB before. Had they not been as
inspiring as they are, we would not have started the cohort at all.
The organizational learning is more subtle. I personally believe
that we do have to paint an ambitious picture of what a
System Change Leader is, to inspire ourselves to always reach
for excellence. While this organizational practice led me to feel
that I couldn’t say “No” even though I felt I was not ready for it, I
think that the “hard way to learn” might be necessary damage
that we have to come to terms with whenever we innovate in
complexity. Therefore, what I learned organizationally is simply
that we should always strive to minimize those damages.
Our program-level failure was that we designed the Fellowship
in response to a need we had identified through our professional
members, but we did not engage them in the design of the
Fellowship itself. This meant that we created and promoted a
product that was not accessible to EWB’s most valuable asset:
its members.
The other root failure is both personal and organizational.
On the personal level, I didn’t have the courage to acknowledge
I wasn’t ready to live up to our really ambitious initial targets.
5
WEARING TOO
MANY HATS
By Meaghan Langille, Advocacy Distributed Team Lead
When it came time to recruit, onboard, and build this year’s
Advocacy Distributed Team, we had our sights on certain
skills and assets that would make our big dreams become
reality in the coming year and beyond. We were planning
a series of events across Canada, the Next Step Summits,
which would feature ideas, networking opportunities, and
discussion about how we can advance Canadian foreign
policy and global development issues by accelerating active
citizenship.
planning and coordination than we planned. This approach
led us to a second failure.
Failure 2: Wearing Too Many Hats
Because we took on more of the responsibility for the
Summits than we intended, and failed to prioritize building
the key competencies in our reps, we placed ourselves in a
position where we were juggling too many priorities – what
I like to call “wearing too many hats.”
Balancing too many hats means some things are bound
to topple, and for our team that meant the coaching and
mentorship of the advocacy community was being placed
on the back-burner. In addition, we were operating in a way
that placed us on a rapid path to burn out.
A total of five events would be held coast-to-coast to bring
together local civic leaders, young professionals, students,
and NGO practitioners, and we knew one of the advocacy
team’s strongest assets in making the Summits a reality would
be the talented and dedicated advocacy representatives
(reps) at Chapters and City Networks across the country.
We knew we had reached a point of reflection: we needed
to look at our progress as a team, our collective energy,
and where we should be prioritizing our efforts. When
we look exclusively at the outcomes of this year and how
we communicate as a team, we are happy. However, we
acknowledge that the processes we take to reach our goals
need to be re-oriented to place coaching, skill building, and
investing in the advocacy community at the forefront of our
team’s focus. In addition, we need to operate in a way that
promotes health and wellbeing within the team.
With this in mind, we set out to recruit a Distributed Team with
strong coaching and mentorship capabilities so they could
continue to build the knowledge, skills, and confidence of
these reps to make the Summits successful. In planning for
the year, we placed coaching and investing in reps as core
components of our team’s operations.
The tricky part was translating that plan into action. More
specifically, as we organized the Summits, two key failures
prevented us from reaching our potential impact.
In recognizing these failures, we have come together as a
team to establish new practices that give team members
the space they need for self-care, while prioritizing time for
coaching advocacy reps and providing the resources they
need to reach their full potential. We look forward to building
on these learnings to ensure the year to come is truly our
best one yet.
Failure 1: Putting the Cart Before the Horse
Despite our intentions, we naturally put the Summits
themselves before the priority of building the key
competencies required to organize and coordinate
such events. Initially, we envisioned reps and Distributed
Team members working together to build our collective
community event organizing skills – in practice, National
Office staff and the Distributed Team took on more direct
6
INVESTING IN PEOPLE
AND SYSTEMS
By Miriam Hird-Younger, AgEx Venture Lead
One of EWB’s core values is Investing in People, and I
believe it is one of the things that we do best. I, myself,
have grown tremendously throughout my time with EWB,
and in regards to our partners, investing in the capacity
and skills of change agents with whom we work has
been crucial to our success. That said, systemic change
includes – but also goes beyond – individual capacity
and development. Systemic change happens when shifts
fundamentally change the way a system works. If change
is solely dependent on an individual, it’s probably not
systemic.
In this case, AgEx had supported a strong foundation of
informal and formal systems to support the project. The
institutions valued A&E to the point of finding a solution
to the problem that arose. However, the problem could
have been entirely prevented if we had invested in the
capacity of more than one individual, and encouraged
inter-lecturer mentorship within each institution. We
believe this lesson is particularly applicable to those
working in systems like Ghana’s public sector, where
transfers and leaves for further studies are commonplace
and mean that champion change agents can leave the
system without much notice.
The AgEx Venture learned this lesson a year after the
Agribusiness and Entrepreneurship (A&E) Project (a
hands-on course in which students develop and launch
their own agribusiness) became a lecturer-driven part
of the curriculum without our ongoing support. In this
process, there was a lot of emphasis placed on building
the capacity of a group of lecturers, one from each
institution, that were passionate about agribusiness
and entrepreneurship. The sustainability of our program
was challenged in 2013, however, when one of our key
lecturers was offered the opportunity to pursue an MA in
Agribusiness in the US, and no one else at the college had
the training to teach the project. College administration
was strongly in favour of the program and did not want to
see the program discontinued, so in the end the principal
of this college coordinated with another to have their
A&E lecturer come to teach. We quickly learned from this
oversight and encouraged each principal and A&E Fellow
to begin building the capacity of at least one additional
lecturer at each institution.
In our Ventures, it is easy to work with the passionate,
excited and quick-to-put-their-hand-up change agents.
But we cannot stop there. We cannot forget that a
change is not systemic or sustainable if it rests in just
one individual. There needs to be systems and structures
around them to ensure that a change becomes part of
the institution and culture – that it becomes formally and
informally a systemic change. Systemic changes must be
institutionalized, rather than individualized.
7
MISSING THE FOREST
FOR THE TREES
By Faiza Tamaiko and Jon Haley, Head of Tamaiko
Enterprise and BDSA Venture Co-Lead
Delivering consultancy and business development services
to dynamic, rapidly-evolving small businesses in West Africa
requires a degree of adaptability and flexibility far above
traditional project-based development work. This creates
a tension with the equally important requirements to
maintain rigour, accountability, and attribution of results.
By focusing too strongly on achieving project objectives,
Business Development Services Africa (BDSA) failed to strike
an appropriate balance in this tension, and nearly missed the
opportunity to make a truly long-term impact on the growth
of Taimako Enterprises.
on, indirect effects borne out of the engagement itself.
For example, through the process of working to formalize
Taimako’s business systems, BDSA sought to improve the
transparency of the company. This had the indirect and
unanticipated impact of stimulating a change within the
company’s leadership structure, creating the opportunity
for the tree seedling business to rebrand and achieve more
flexibility and independence. Focusing on the mechanics of
the business and producing the hard, technical deliverables
of the project – such as drafting policies and establishing
accounting systems – actually delayed progress towards the
larger, more fundamental shift occurring at the company.
The result was a success in absolute terms, but a failure in
the relative terms of completing deliverables and proving
attribution of the results.
BDSA is a venture of EWB Canada’s Small and Growing
Business Portfolio, working as technical and business
consultants to growth-stage agricultural businesses in Ghana
and Zambia. Taimako Enterprises Ltd. (now RAINCorp) is a
second-generation family business located in Tamale, Ghana.
They specialize in the production of timber and food crop tree
seedlings and are one of the largest suppliers of seedlings in
Northern Ghana.
Should small business technical assistance projects disregard
objectives, outcomes and deliverables? Not exactly. What
is important to realize is just how dynamic and emergent a
small business environment can be, and to design a planning,
monitoring, and evaluating approach that accepts constant
change and ambiguity as an integral element of the work –
not as an undesirable aspect to be mitigated and managed
away. Moreover, long-term outcomes and impacts must be
the ultimate measure of a project’s success, and attribution of
the change-work results should never come at the expense
of the change itself.
BDSA and Taimako formed a partnership in 2013 with the
mutual goal of improving Taimako’s business practices,
financial management, and organizational structure. At the
time, these high level objectives were chosen to achieve what
both organizations believed was required for Taimako to take
the next step as a rapidly growing business. Over the next
13 months, the priorities, business environment, and many
other factors rapidly evolved, while the stated objectives and
metrics for the project’s success did not keep pace.
At the end of the contract, the direct outcomes of the stated
deliverables proved to be far less important than the knock-
8
MANAGING SCALE
AND GROWTH
By Esther Aba Eshun and Gordon Chan, CCLEAr
Leadership and BDSA Venture Co-Lead
Financial System at the Incubator
As a private-public partnership between several stakeholders,
CCLEAr uses a system whereby partners oversee incubator
operations, but they are rarely physically present. Because
of this, a lot of travel is needed to get cheques and other
financial matters sorted out with key individuals, delaying
payment for services. CCLEAr’s growth requires the incubator
to meet a greater number of financial obligations, while
the speed of its activities and strength of relationships with
suppliers and employees is significantly impacted. In some
cases, service providers have become unsure of when the
incubator will pay their invoices, weakening our professional
reputation within the communities we serve.
For over a year now, EWB’s Business Development
Services Africa (BDSA) Venture has supported the
growth of Creating Competitive Livestock Entrepreneurs
in Agribusiness (CCLEAr), an incubator for livestock
agribusinesses in Accra, Ghana. Entrepreneurs selected for
CCLEAr’s incubation services are provided with technical
support, mentorship, and funding. These businesses also
gain access to research facilities, investors, customers, and
training.
Though CCLEAr was established only two years ago, it has
grown rapidly. Our incubator’s team has increased from
two employees to six, and the number of applications
has tripled to more than 250, with 42 businesses selected
for incubation in our second cohort compared to only
13 businesses in our first. CCLEAr is proud of its progress,
but this growth has come with a price.
Thinking Ahead and Clarifying Priorities
As the incubator expands, it is clear that supportive structures
and processes must change. However, developing these
new structures requires an agreement on priorities. Should
CCLEAr serve greater numbers of entrepreneurs, or focus
on improving the quality of its support? The incubator’s
staff is now experimenting with services for agribusiness
associations that will hopefully enhance both quantity
and quality, but there is inevitably less personal attention
provided to businesses. Similarly, should CCLEAr prioritize
the speed of its payments or uphold its current financial
oversight? While CCLEAr maintains high ethical standards,
the removal of some financial controls may create a
suspicion of (and room for) corruption, which can damage
the incubator’s reputation.
Quantity Over Quality?
The approach used at CCLEAr ensures that each
entrepreneur receives tailor-made services to suit their
needs: experts in agriculture and management visit each
business to generate personalized plans that inform
their incubation. However, when there is a desire for
scale and aggressive targets must be reached to satisfy
donors, it becomes an issue of quantity against quality.
Resources are stretched to cover more entrepreneurs,
instead of serving a limited number and more effectively
meeting their needs. As an example, developing these
personalized plans for each of the 42 agribusinesses –
located across six regions – involves time and finances
from the incubator, and CCLEAr has struggled to
minimize the delay for this particular service.
By anticipating the implications of expansion and working
with stakeholders to establish acceptable priorities and limits,
organizations can better manage their growth and success.
9
10
FAILURE TO FAIL,
AND TO LEARN
By Boris Martin, CEO of Engineers Without Borders
There are failures that hit you at once. The mistake is evident,
and learning can be done openly on the bad choice that was
made. Then there are failures that are more insidious: boilingthe-frog type failures – patterns that repeat themselves and hurt
performance. It is harder to see them because they inflict lower
performance over the long term, and result in invisible, missed
opportunities. The failure I want to share is of this second kind.
arguments? We never really opened up the conversation
to others. We didn’t consider other alternatives, didn’t play
them forward, didn’t imagine how they would translate into
performance. Instead, I went along with the one rationale
presented. In the end, confident logic, presented with
vehemence, was what made the decision convincing.
This type of practice – relying on logical argumentation, without
inviting hard, evidence-based questions into the decision
making process – runs completely contrary to my personal
claim to embrace failure, be strategic, and be open to learning.
The pattern I want to discuss is best recognized through a past
example: in 2012, as part of the Executive Team, I helped decide
on a new organizational structure for EWB’s national office.
We presented the new structure with eloquent, logical
explanations. There were strategic considerations and
sophisticated arguments which were all coherent and clear. Yet
the logic presented for the re-organization left other reasons
unspoken. At the time, there were inter-personal conflicts that
made it hard for some teams to be functional, and the split
avoided that issue, rather than address it. Had we been willing to
confront some of the conflicts, we may have decided not to reorganize because the new structure presented too much risk,
and now, two years later, this new structure has not translated
into greater performance. Looking back, it is a failure on my part
for not calling out the risk.
What worries me the most is that over the past four years
working at the EWB national office, I have noticed that whenever
an idea is presented to me, it is usually logical and compelling,
and presented as the only option. I have also noticed that I can
come across as challenging and untrusting when I question
someone’s idea, when what I really want to do is open up the
opportunity to deepen our learning, and consider alternatives.
I’m working to figure out how I can bring up my questions to
foster curious exploration, but I also wonder how I can make it
safe for anyone to question their own ideas and those of each
other more frequently, openly and safely, and for the norm
to be that we carry out some due diligence when making
recommendations.
The failure goes much beyond a bad re-organization choice to
the pattern of the decision-making process. The pattern led to
this failure, and I believe it has led to many failures of this kind
before, and since.
I could blame everyone else for presenting ideas with no
backup, no due diligence, but I would be ignoring that this is
the mode of thinking that I usually use myself, and hence, likely
instigate in others. I believe that what I am seeing today is only
In 2012, the arguments we were providing were neither
a reflection of what I ask for, and what I practice myself. The first
grounded in evidence, nor informed by other organizations’
thing to change is how I bring up, justify, and question ideas.
experiences. They were logical, yes, but did the logic withstand
hard evidence-based questions? Were there no other counter
11
I have collected anecdotal evidence of the cost this type
of behavior has on our organization:
• It establishes a biased pecking order. Those with the ability
to have complex and logical argumentation and vehement
language win the day, however bad their ideas;
• It affects every team member’s confidence, especially those
who are sensing rather than intuitive (in Myers Briggs terms)
and who don’t verbalize arguments as easily; and
• It likely misses alternatives that sensing members of our
team may have advanced, though this is harder to collect
evidence for – as they are missed opportunities.
This is what I will do to address this failure:
• I will open up my decisions for critical assessment grounded
in real life data and observations in an effort to establish a
culture of curiosity and learning;
• I will make sure at least two or three alternatives are
considered whenever we make an important decision; and
• I will use plain language to make recommendations: I will
say what I mean, in a way that others can understand and
contrast to their own views.
12
PAY EARLY RATHER
THAN LATER
By Mina Shahid and Mark Brown, Kulumela Co-Leads
When we set out to launch Kulemela’s formal portfolio of
investments, there was a lot of excitement. We had a great,
experienced team, some absolutely inspiring entrepreneurs and
more investor interest than we could ask for. We were excited
about designing relevant and effective financing products that
would unlock the potential of the Ghanaian agriculture sector,
specifically for small-scale farmers. As such, we wanted to get
things underway as quickly – and with as few costs – as possible.
It was fine that we didn’t have perfect organizational systems in
place, we thought, because our team’s skills and commitment
would more than make up for it.
We recognize that it can feel uncomfortable to build systems
that feel suspicious of co-founders and early employees. You’re
starting something new, and it’s assumed that everyone is
working in the best interest of the organization – but in the
end, it’s always better to be safe than sorry, and it is necessary
to ensure security.
This failure led to a loss of a year’s worth of progress, and has
significantly challenged our own potential to create positive
change in the world. Despite this, we still recognize that we did
some amazing work. We invested in some incredible Ghanaian
agribusiness entrepreneurs who had struggled to access
financing from other sources, and we’ve been recognized
globally for our approach.
Like many start-ups, we had a lot of transitions in our first year,
but the co-founders stuck around through it all. At one point,
we were left with a single bank signatory in Ghana and bank
statements reported to the accounting team in Canada. Our
big mistake was that we should have had core accounting
team members as signatories on the Ghanaian bank accounts,
even if it cost us thousands of dollars more in work permit fees.
Fundamentally, this is what caused the failure of our agriculture
loan portfolio.
We are still healing from our experience, and we’re synthesizing
our learning in order to be more effective change makers in the
future. We still believe in the power of agriculture investment
to reduce poverty in Africa, and we’re looking forward to being
more resilient in our next initiative.
None of us anticipated it, but huge sums of money were
misappropriated, and forged bank statements covered the
trail for months. We have not been able to make any new
investments over a nine-month period, and our operations
have probably been set back a year. We have been able to
deliver on investor repayment milestones – but only through
huge sacrifices on the behalf of our co-founders, exhausting
them financially, emotionally, and physically. The year has been
extremely difficult, and as a result, we’ve decided to no longer
pursue agriculture loans in Ghana in 2015.
13
LEADERS ASK
FOR HELP
By Isabelle Barbeau, Kumvana Program Junior Fellow
The Kumvana Program builds the capacity of dynamic
leaders in Africa who are systems change entrepreneurs,
intrapreneurs, and business leaders in their communities.
The selected Kumvana leaders participate in a seven-month
leadership program.
These interactions made me realize that being a leader
includes being able to ask for help from the right individuals,
at the right time.
More broadly, I think it’s valuable to look to the institutional
level. My failure to ask for help taught me that power dynamics
and language barriers can be a hurdle to doing great work.
As such, I have come away from the Junior Fellowship as a
champion for fostering a culture of consideration, patience,
understanding, and open-mindedness.
Kumvana is known for bringing many of these leaders from
Africa to Canada to participate in an intensive four-week
experience in Canada. I was the first to go the other way: from
Canada to Ghana on a short-term basis as part of Engineers
Without Borders Canada’s (EWB) Junior Fellowship. As a
Francophone in an English-speaking country, I faced several
challenges during my placement.
Finally, I want to be part of creating support systems that
bring to life the EWB values of striving for humility and
investing in people so as to enable and empower the next
generation of change makers.
My failure as a Junior Fellow was my fear of asking others
for help. Because of the language barrier and my perceived
lack of power compared to Venture Leaders and other EWB
Fellows, I was reluctant to reach out for the support and
feedback that I required for my work and final reports. This
negatively impacted my performance as a Junior Fellow.
In the latter half of my placement, I built my own support
network. I reached out to Kumvana Leaders in Ghana, since, I
thought, they had been in my exact shoes during their time
in Canada. They seemed much less intimidating to me.
My hope in communicating this story is that we build an
appreciation for how scary and tremendously challenging it
can be for one’s performance and mental health – especially
with a language barrier – to be new in a large organization like
Engineers Without Borders Canada. I let that fear prevent me
from asking for help at first, but as I reached out to Kumvana
Leaders, I saw the value in making myself vulnerable to them
and creating my own support network.
14
THE LEARNING
CURVE
By Souzan Mirza, President of McMaster Chapter
One of the greatest failures at the McMaster Chapter last year
was the lack of cohesiveness among our executive group –
we had taken on too many new members, and didn’t invest
in their understanding of Engineers Without Borders Canada
(EWB). This failure led to a lack of support, poor dissemination
of information, and dwindling motivation and commitment
within our team.
We also learned that having a personal connection to the
people within your organization leads to an improvement in
performance in a leadership position. In conclusion, we learned
we should prioritize the value of experience when creating
a team, but also couple it with a commitment to invest in the
capacity of our new members to develop an effective and
cohesive team.
After some collective reflection, our team identified the key
reason for this failure. The application process to become a
leader in our chapter was very informal – anyone could apply,
allowing us to bring in new talent. We thought that by giving
someone a leadership position, an increased sense of ownership
over their role and responsibilities would follow. However,
this was often not the case – we deeply underestimated the
learning curve our new members would experience and failed
to appreciate the challenges they would face due to their lack
of familiarity with the organization. This, as well as an absence of
social activities, resulted in very tenuous relationships between
members, which exacerbated the communications divide.
Although we were all working toward the same goals and had
interest in development work, we could not translate these
shared passions into meaningful relationships because we
were unable to effectively invest in a team with so many new
members. This meant that there were redundancies in our
work, lower retention rates within our action teams, and less
accessible support.
“There were
redundancies in
our work, lower
retention rates
within our action
teams, and less
accessible
support.”
From our failures last year, we learned many valuable lessons. We
learned that when choosing a managerial team it is important
to choose in part from your existing talent pool, as they already
have a working knowledge of the role and the organization.
15
FAILURE TO
LET GO
By Quinn Conlon, University of Toronto Chapter
Youth Engagement Co-Lead
In my final year of high school, myself and the leader
of the University of Windsor Chapter’s Youth Venture
Portfolio developed the High school Outreach Program
Experience (HOPE) team, a small group of students
grades 9-12 from schools all over the city that were
passionate about international development. Upon
finishing high school and moving to Toronto for
university last September, I joined a similar portfolio at
UofT, and developed a new HOPE team in Toronto. I was
fortunate enough to work with some truly incredible
high school students last year – passionate, capable,
and critical individuals that poured a lot of effort into
building a foundation for HOPE. While the HOPE team
had a very successful pilot year in Toronto, I believe that
my failure to let go of my position of leadership took
away from the potential experience of some of the
members, and hurt the sustainability of our movement.
Reflecting back with honesty, I believe that my overinvolvement was the result of my averseness to
relinquish control of a project in which I was so deeply
and passionately invested. By offering to take on work
that would have otherwise been done by the students
I was unwittingly denying them meaningful learning
opportunities. I had tied the project to my identity,
and ultimately failed to fully empower the students
whose leadership abilities I had originally committed to
developing.
One of the greatest challenges in founding and
developing a project is acknowledging when it has
grown to a point where it requires something outside
of what you can offer. There tends to be a lingering
reluctance to let go, a subtle unwillingness to remove
yourself from the system. My experience helped me
to recognize that we need to put the project first and
accept when demands have shifted – we have to
critically ask ourselves what’s best for our cause, not for
our egos. Empowering others to grow into positions of
leadership allows the project to be exposed to different
perspectives, enabling it to grow in ways we never
could achieve by keeping it to ourselves.
When I began the Toronto Chapter’s HOPE team, I was
determined to be an effective university coordinator
– providing support and guidance when requested
but allowing the students to determine their own
priorities and chart their own course. However, as the
year progressed it became clear that I wasn’t fulfilling
this commitment. Rather than facilitating discussion,
I found that I frequently dominated conversation in
meetings, potentially speaking over students that may
have had other opinions or perspectives to share. I also
gradually became far more involved in the team than
was healthy or sustainable, offering to take on tasks
and projects that should have been delegated to other
students.
This year the Toronto HOPE team is up and running
again, but I’ve delegated the role of university
coordinator to an individual with a vastly different
approach to leadership – organized, level-headed,
and naturally adept at facilitating discussion without
becoming too involved. While it’s been difficult to
remove myself, I have faith in the team’s passion and
purpose – I’m excited to watch its new direction unfold.
At the time, I justified my involvement as concern for
the students and a desire not to overload our members.
16
JUST NOT GOOD
ENOUGH
By Jeeshan Ahmed, University of Regina Chapter
Global Engineering Lead
The Global Engineering (GE) team at the University Of Regina
Chapter of Engineers Without Borders Canada (EWB) was
thrilled to launch its inaugural Global Engineering Competition
on campus this year. The GE team consisted of the Director of
GE, Dumo Fiabema, as well as EWB members Arsalan Khan,
Damien Bolingbroke, our faculty advisor, Dr. Denise Stilling,
and me. The GE team was fortunate to have the support of
the entire chapter in the planning of the event. As this was our
first competition, we made some mistakes and learned some
difficult lessons – namely, we came to appreciate the critical
importance of investing in capacity and ownership.
We realized we had assumed participants would have prior
knowledge specific to our organization; we didn’t spend
enough time with the participants coaching them on how to
approach the problem scenarios. Going forward, we need to
do a better job designing the case studies so that they give
participants clear directions on the path to take.
We neglected to build ownership in our judges. Rather than
collaborate with them on the development of the case studies,
we simply completed the case studies on our own, and told the
judges how to go about evaluating them. By improving our
communication with the judges, particularly in the planning
phase, we would enable them to evaluate presentations more
effectively and provide better feedback.
Actual Failure
One of the chapter’s top goals for the 2013-14 academic
year was to promote Global Engineering concepts in the
Engineering Faculty, so we thought it would be a great idea
to encourage students to participate in a competition that
involved case studies on gender diversity, local environmental
problems, and a few of EWB’s African Ventures.
So What?
On both fronts, we failed to invest and communicate with the
key stakeholders involved in our competition. When running
a project with multiple stakeholders, it’s far too easy to lose
touch and assume decisions and information developed
in a centralized group will reach everyone else. In reality, we
learned that we need to be proactive in reaching out during
the planning and executing stages to ensure that all parties are
informed, engaged, and invested in the purpose of the project,
so that they can effectively participate.
However, we failed to invest in the participants’ capacity, which
prevented them from drawing meaningful learning from the
case studies or identifying the root causes of the issues they
were presented with. At the same time, we didn’t reach out to
our panel of judges when developing the case studies, which
resulted in them being less engaged in the topics than we had
hoped.
Our first GE competition proved to be a challenging and
difficult learning process. That said, we’re proud of the change
we created, and we’re excited to have another crack at hosting a
successful GE competition next year!
What Was Learned?
After the competition, our team identified two key learnings
that we could take from the experience.
17
“YOU NEVER CAME
TO VISIT”
By Rebecca Kresta, WatSan Junior Fellow
I walked down the dust roads in rural Malawi, on the way to
meet a potential host family with whom I would live during my
four-month internship working with Engineers Without Borders
Canada’s (EWB) Water and Sanitation (WatSan) Venture. My
mind wandered to thoughts of what the family would be like:
images of playing with host siblings, learning to cook over a fire,
and learning about life in Malawi played through my head. This,
I thought to myself, was the only way to understand poverty,
and through extension, to understand the work I was doing.
just as there are in Canada; I failed to move past the stories that
limited my ability to learn. I also failed to recognize that one
invitation is enough to be welcomed.
Prior to my placement, as I listened to stories from past JFs, I
subconsciously created a defined box within which my host
family had to live. I went overseas feeling proud that I had
moved beyond so many stereotypes about Africa: Tarzan
would not be my host brother, and I would not see kids with
flies on their faces. I came home humbled: there are university
professors in Malawi that put doilies on their armchairs. They
are as much a part of Malawi as low-income families, and they
had just as much to teach me. By failing to visit, my assumptions
about host families were compounded because I lost another
chance to learn.
My heart sank as I saw a white house with a car in the carport
and a satellite dish beckoning from the roof. If this was to be the
basis of my immersive local experience – I noted dictionaries on
the bookshelf and doilies on the easy chair backs with dismay –
how would I learn here?
After a brief conversation with my coach, I thanked the older
couple that lived in the house, a professor and a nurse, for their
offer but explained that I was looking for something different in
my placement. They nodded, understanding, and invited me to
come visit anytime.
My caricaturized image of host families was reinforced
by organizational stories of what a host family should
be like. As an organization and as individuals, we need
to challenge the pervasive stereotypes of ‘real Africa,” and
embrace the vastly diverse array of experiences of what
life in Malawi or Ghana can be.
Four months later, I wished the couple farewell as I wrapped
up my internship experience. “But you never came to visit,” the
husband said sadly, seeming genuinely disappointed. I quickly
apologized and said a hasty goodbye. To myself, I justified my
lack of responsiveness by thinking that they had only invited me
once, and never reached out again, so how could I know that
they actually wanted me to visit, and weren’t merely being polite?
When I came home, and reflected with other Junior Fellows, I
started to come to terms with some of the critical assumptions
I had made prior to and during my placement. I failed to
recognize that there are different standards of living in Malawi,
18
MONITORING, EVALUATING,
AND ADAPTING TO FAILURE
IN A COMPLEX SYSTEM
By Malawi Water and Sanitation Venture
Last year, the Malawi Water and Sanitation Venture developed
a new approach to monitoring and evaluation (M&E) that
would allow us to capture the successes and failures of our
initiatives more systematically.
Organizations who work on complex problems need to build
M&E systems that allow this through:
•
Our program evaluation in March 2014 showed we had
failed to achieve five of our eleven strategic objectives.
However, underlying each of these failures was the
recognition that certain aspects of our M&E system failed
to assist us in effectively adapting to failures as they
emerged, and in capturing indications of progress in line
with our strategic objectives.
•
Incorporatingongoingshort-term,orformative,evaluations
that encourage proactive shifts in approaches to avoid
failure. Approaches to achieve an objective might need
to change over a planned time period.
L ayering indicators. Keep one set of indicators fixed at the
strategic objective level, and have a second set that can
be modified to track the success of specific, changeable
approaches.
In our next iteration of the system, we plan to build in clear
processes for formative evaluations and adjusting indicators
appropriately. We hope this will allow us to proactively
explore new approaches, and replace or complement failing
approaches to deliver on the given timeframe, while allowing
us to measure progress against our overall strategic objectives
even as we pivot approaches to attain them.
For example, one strategic objective was to improve
learning channels between district water offices. At our
mid-year review, it was clear that our chosen approach,
built on a reporting template, would fail to produce the
learning channels we had envisioned. Though we shifted
our approach, we were not left with enough time to achieve
the objective. In this case, we had defined our indicators
at the approach level, measuring our success against
establishing the reporting template specifically, rather than
the objective of improving learning channels. In this and
other cases, while we had naturally pivoted approaches
to deliver on our strategic objectives, we did not have a
well-defined or implemented process to proactively adjust
approaches or to adjust indicators to match them.
Working in a complex system requires holding a number
of strategic objectives constant, while at the same time
iterating the approaches through which to achieve them.
19
2014 FAILURE
REPORT TEAM
Nicole Boulianne, Paul Cescon, Brian Cheung, Alexandra Conliffe,
Quinn Conlon, Ashley Good, Ashraful Hasan, Julia Milner, Owen Osbourne,
Cameron Revington, Anamjit Singh Sivia, Anna Smith, Samantha Turley
312 Adelaide Street West, Suite 302, Toronto, ON M5V 1R2
TF 1 (866) 481-3696 | T (416) 481-3696 | www.ewb.ca